That downrange disturbance almost looks like the measurable effects of a shock-wave which in turn probably says something about the atmospheric density and structure in that region. Clearly there's a whole lot of derived science that likely will be gleaned from these images.

You know, if we keep seeing these things happen on Jupiter & (hopefully!) the other gas giants, we're going to have to come up with some sort of workable nomenclature for all these features.

Virtually every bit of impact terminology relates to solid matter (craters, ejecta, etc.). What do you call a persistent hole in a cloud deck that apparently spews stuff out & has other stuff laying around on surrounding clouds?

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A few will take this knowledge and use this power of a dream realized as a force for change, an impetus for further discovery to make less ancient dreams real.

I think in the case of impacts onto gas giants, the old term for a meteor crater, "astrobleme," works well. It really is more of a blemish than a crater -- and like a blemish, it will fade over time.

Almost looks like there was the familiar-from-SL9 "black-eye" effect of downstream ejecta to the left, plus a very long, very dark ejected plume that pushed back out from left to right in these images. I get the feel of an impactor on a shallow, fast trajectory moving from right to left (in the Hubble images; all this would be reversed in the original discovery photos and the Gemini images), the "black-eye" ejecta pushing ahead of the impact site (perhaps defined by shock waves from the impact), and a plume of very dark material (mostly gas, I imagine) being fountained out of the impact site back along the impactor's track, from left to right, making up the very dark, now-deforming oval marking the astrobleme.

Just my gut-level feel from looking at these new, sharp images...

-the other Doug

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“The trouble ain't that there is too many fools, but that the lightning ain't distributed right.” -Mark Twain

Yeah, I was thinking about "astrobleme" myself, oDoug; it really is apropos for these things, as you pointed out.

I'm sure that there are hordes of scientists that would gladly give one or more internal organs to know exactly what that dark material is composed of. I suspect that it's some sort of precipitate: hot, formerly highly pressurized gas from down below that's abruptly been exposed to cold & low pressure in the cloudtops.

Wonder if astroblemes might be a productive molecular synthesis mechanism over time.

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A few will take this knowledge and use this power of a dream realized as a force for change, an impetus for further discovery to make less ancient dreams real.

I think it's most likely that the dark stuff is hydrocarbon gunk cooked up from the ambient methane by the high temperatures of the impact. The dark stuff in the diffuse halo may even form in place, from the high temperatures generated when the ejecta slams back into the upper atmosphere- heat from that mechanism was what produced the bright near-IR flashes seen in the SL9 impacts.

Since these impacts are apparently fairly frequent (since we have observed two in a short time) and the "gunk" produced should be fairly stable in the low temperatures prevailing in the upper atmosphere one wonders how much "gunk" accumulates and to what extent it contributes to Jupiter's colourful atmosphere. I would expect that the molecules will ultimately sink deep enough into the atmosphere for the heat to break them up into simple molecules again, but that should be a slow process.

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